1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to electrical connectors, specifically to such electrical connectors used in electrical circuit elements for prototyping electric circuits by electrical engineers, electronic circuit enthusiasts, and students of electronics.
2. Description of Prior Art
Electric circuits are typically prototyped by attaching discrete electrical components to a breadboard. Discrete electrical components are commonly referred to as circuit elements and include, but are not limited to, resistors, capacitors, inductors, diodes, transformers, transistors, batteries, light emitting diodes, and wires. As an electric circuit is constructed, a breadboard provides a place to interconnect such circuit elements. A breadboard is typically a printed circuit board, a shorting pin breadboard, or a wire wrap breadboard. Depending on the type of breadboard, circuit elements are attached to the breadboard by soldering, circuit element lead insertion, or wire wrapping.
Electrical circuit elements are housed in insulating materials with exposed conducting contacts called leads. The broadest categories of such elements, according to lead type, are through-hole and surface mount. Both of these types of housings are intended for mass production purposes but are also used for prototyping. It would be useful if these circuit elements could be housed in a way that would facilitate faster and easier preproduction processes such as design, development and prototyping of electric circuits. It would also benefit the preproduction processes if the housing was independent of the use of any breadboard. Such independence from breadboards facilitates removal of some prototyping problems associated with typical breadboards.
In the case of a breadboard of the printed circuit board variety, an insulated surface is plated with a layout of conducting material interconnecting a plurality of plated through-holes or surface mount pads. Circuit elements are either inserted into the holes or glued into place depending on whether the circuit element is a through-hole or surface mount design. In both cases, the circuit elements are soldered into position. The process of etching a layout in the conducting material and subsequent soldering of circuit elements is time consuming. With surface mount components, the process is especially difficult due to the small sizes of the circuit elements to be soldered. Printed circuit board type of breadboards may also require the use of toxins such as when using lead based solder for soldering or when using certain chemicals required to etch a printed circuit board layout. Additionally, a circuit built using this method almost never resembles a schematic drawing of the same circuit as designed. Such a mismatch between the resulting circuit and the schematic drawing translates into difficulty for a user who needs to test and troubleshoot the resulting circuit.
In the case of breadboards that use shorting clips, each connecting wire must be inserted into the proper shorting clip as a circuit is being constructed. The shorting clips are usually very close to each other and the circuit very rarely resembles a schematic drawing of the circuit. After many parts are connected it may be difficult or even impossible to remove devices buried under the wires used to connect the circuit elements. Also, the circuit on this type of breadboard is very difficult to trace for errors. Shorting clips can loose their resiliency after much use. Also, circuit element leads can get worn through readjustment from one circuit prototype to the next.
In the case of wire wrapped breadboards, connecting together individual circuit elements is a time consuming process typically requiring a user to wire wrap each lead of each circuit element. A circuit built using this method may have many wires crossing and will most likely not resemble a schematic drawing of the circuit. Circuit elements cannot be removed easily to study the effect of such a removal or demonstrate their function.
It would be desirable to facilitate a method of electric circuit construction which would considerably reduce the time needed to construct, test, and modify a prototype circuit. It would further be preferable if such a method depended on a resilient electrical connector. Such a resilient connector would more readily connect to a similar complementary connector in order to join circuit elements together during circuit construction.
Conducting helical coils have been used in a subset of electrical connectors. Such coils can be constructed to conform to a variety of shapes when connected in a circuit. Furthermore, such coils can also resiliently preserve a predetermined shape after breaking a connection with a circuit. U.S. Pat. No. 4,810,213 to Chabot (1989) discusses the use of conducting helical coils as a method of maintaining the electrical contact of a connector in certain positions. The turns of coils provide a multiplicity of engaged surfaces acting in parallel which are free to adjust themselves independently to make good electrical contact. However, all of the arrangements which Chabot suggests present only one connector of the mating pair as having a conducting coil with the opposite side of the connection having a solid conducting surface despite the many orientations suggested.
Helical conducting coils find application as connectors between substrates. U.S. Pat. No. 5,030,109 to Dery (1991) takes the idea of helical coils as stacking connectors between interconnecting substrates. While he does point out the advantage of redundant conducting paths of the contact of the loops of the coils to circuit pads of the substrates, there is still a dependency of having circuit pads on substrates without any indication of a complementary connector similar to a conducting coil. U.S. Pat. No. 6,666,690 to Ishizuka (2003) reiterates another particular application of conducting coils between substrates with the feature of radial deformation of the coil where the benefit of such deformation is additional pressure for a stronger contact with the connecting substrates. However, there is no similar complementary coil connector to the radial deformed coil implied or suggested.
In all of the above cases discussing conducting coil connectors, the application of any conducting coil is only to one side of an electrical connection. There is no mention of any method of interfacing two conducting coils as complementary connectors to each other. It would therefore be beneficial if there was a radial deformed arrangement of conducting coils such that such a conducting coil could be connected with a similar complementary coil. Such an electrical connector would leverage the benefits of a multiplicity of redundant conducting surfaces and make use of radial deformation for a stronger contact both physically and electrically. An electrical connector with the described benefits would largely aid in the building and testing of electric circuits if combined with an appropriate electric circuit element housing and an accompanying method of constructing electric circuits.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,449,167 to Seymour (2002) is an attempt at facilitating a method of electric circuit construction which would considerably reduce the time needed to construct, test, and modify a prototype circuit for a production layout, but that invention requires circuit elements housed with magnets which are attracted to a special breadboard. The requirement of magnets can be expensive and can affect some circuit elements due to the presence of the extraneous magnetic fields. While circuit element housings using such a system can be laid out similarly to a schematic drawing of the same circuit, such a system presents confusion without a clear label depicting which circuit element is being placed on the breadboard. For example, transistors with different electrical properties often share the same type of physical housing but transistor leads are often in a reconfigured order. In any such similar case, a user may confuse the leads of a circuit element unwittingly and construct a circuit incorrectly.
Another alternative, the SNAP CIRCUITS™ circuit building system, manufactured by Elenco Electronics Inc. of Wheeling, Ill., uses snaps as connectors interconnecting circuit elements. The SNAP CIRCUITS™ system uses a matrix of preset positions on an insulator base grid for supporting placement of circuit elements in housings having the snap connectors. The base grid dictates discrete positions where circuit elements may be placed and can limit the positions of circuit elements. While this approach has circuit elements represented graphically along side the actual components in the pieces that connect with snaps, these pieces do not have uniform housings and so the result can be messy. A circuit constructed using this system may require unintended cleverness on the part of a user who needs to get unaligned sections of a circuit connected. Snaps of different sections of the circuit may be at a different heights and will not meet snaps together of physically adjacent circuit elements without extra snapping interfaces. Considering the above, the circuit constructed by this method may not even look like a layout of an original schematic diagram even though each circuit element housing in the constructed circuit has a graphic depicting the circuit element within or attached to the housing.
U.S. patent application 2004/0096812 of Goh (2004) presents a breadboard for educational purposes. The breadboard of Goh is designed to allow circuit elements housed within schematically labeled component blocks to be placed in such a way that the end result looks similar to a circuit schematic diagram. However, necessitating a breadboard is a bulky feature, and the shorting pins of the breadboard will lose resiliency over time. Additionally, the circuit built, whose sum of all the component block labels would look similar to a schematic, is forced to conform to the breadboard. This conformity to the breadboard can result in an awkward arrangement of component blocks whose resulting sum of all the component block labels looks appreciably different than the original circuit schematic diagram.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,623,312 to Crawford (1986) is an attempt to use modularly uniformed sized and labeled electric circuit element housings, or units, to build electric circuits. These modular units may be connected by means of joining units next to each other and interconnecting wires to and from various units to build a circuit. However, that invention requires the modular units to be stacked vertically in such a way as to render difficult the swapping in and out of the units. In addition, the connecting wires used to interface one unit with another can get messy by crossing over other connecting wires and obstructing the view of the labels of other units. Finally, the end result is a working electric circuit, but only marginally looking like the complete schematic which is not easily verified by quick visual check.
In all of the above cases, circuit element housings of different types of circuit elements vary in size and shape, combine together through a stacking process, or require an intervening breadboard. The variance in shape and the process of stacking circuit elements causes barriers in interfacing circuit elements when trying to construct electrical circuits quickly and with ease. A circuit element that fits in one location may not fit in another location because the space between the places where the leads connect differs in orientation or shape, or removing a circuit element and replacing it with another circuit element may involve significant deconstruction of the original circuit before being able to replace the circuit element. It would be beneficial if there was a configurable or standardized housing that could be used for a standard set of circuit elements and facilitates connections which do not depend on stacking the circuit elements.
It is even more desirable if the final layout of a prototyped circuit resembles a schematic drawing diagram of the circuit with increased accuracy while removing dependence on the use of a breadboard or other printed circuit board as the intermediary between the circuit elements either as an arrangement of conductors or simply an insulating spacer. Additionally, if each circuit element had a graphical representation affixed unto itself which corresponded directly it a connector which interfaced with not a wire or a breadboard but a complementary connector of another similarly housed circuit element, then the combination of these circuit elements could be made to look significantly similar if not identical to the schematic diagram of the electrical circuit under construction. Likewise, if circuit element housings were uniformly shaped with connectors that allowed easy swapping in and out of different circuit elements in such housings without stacking such housings, then in general the circuit construction would be easier, faster and look attractive. Additionally, circuit elements used in circuit construction would have reusability for future prototyping. Finally, if such circuit element housings were configured with resilient conducting coil connectors which interface with similar complementary connectors by way of a simple and easy insertion and extraction method, then the circuit construction process would become even easier and faster.
It is, therefore, desirable to facilitate an improved method of constructing circuits, which attains the preceding objectives and overcomes most, if not all, of the preceding problems.